Ian McKellen backed by the Royal Shakespeare Company returns to UCLA’s Royce Hall with only a weekend left, and I’m going to miss it!  Some scalpers on CraigsList are asking as much as $1000 for a single ticket:

• Single King Lear ticket. $1,000.00 Stage Left S5 Very Close to stage. Oct. 28 Sunday performance. Royce hall has configured special staging for the Royal Shakespeare performances. This ticket is right near the stage.

• King Lear two (2) tickets with Ian McKellen Sat 27th 2pm – $1800

I’m too conservative to find someone generous to take me. I would not feel right asking for a press pass if that were even an option. The worst is that I know what I’ll be missing.

It was Sir Ian McKellen’s potent live performance in Richard III at UCLA 15 years ago that lit my imagination with enough wattage to clear away the pain of a relationship break up. Set in a 1930′s fascist England, the UCLA staging was spare and direct. Each scene resolved like a clean sentence with McKellen delivering the punctuation marks.

My boyfriend at the time was still in love with his blond, blue-eyed, Claudia Schiffer-esque ex-girlfriend. During the break by strange synchronicity, I remember I saw her in the Royce Hall lobby. She, on the other hand, had moved on it appeared. This was Jung’s golden scarab beetle tapping at the window and telling me to pay attention. To pay more attention to Shakespeare that is. And to Ian McKellen’s genius.

I cleared my head (and heart) of all distraction and recorded that performance using my eyes and that aesthetic sense we call the inner ear. This was in 1992. I am still able to pull up McKellen’s performance from memory where it remains an “echo to the sense.”

For a long time, I wished a video of the actual live performance would be released.  No luck. Instead a few years later, McKellan starred in a film adaptation. Richard III, the movie, is similar to Richard III, the staged performance, only in title, setting, and script. The film lacks space for the imagination and was never meant to be interactive with an audience.

Today I read Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Charles McNulty’s mixed review of King Lear. I wince when McKulty references McKellen’s role as Gandalf, the wizard in Lord of the Rings, to bookend his essay. Once I get past that, his review tells me that I’m blowing it by not going to this.

The photos below copyright Manuel Harlon © RSC 2007 and grabbed from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s website: